Scary, huh? The book focuses less on well-known comics, such as those from EC Comics, and more on forgotten titles, with a significant amount of the drawings completed by artists unknown. Of particular interest to me is a comic story called "The Secret of the Walking Dead", by Fawcett Publications Inc. The grimy linework, flat contrasting colors, and horrific content of the comic (corpse climbing into a coffin!) were exactly the sort of thing that would have creeped me out as a kid! I love it.
Included with the book, is a DVD containing a documentary that aired in 1955, narrated by Paul Coates. The documentary is an attack on the comics industry and the content of their products, and is notably late (taking place after the Senate hearings and the creation of the Comics Code Authority) and was thus decidedly irrelevant. (See my previous post dated 3-22-2011). However, Trombetta still counterattacks Coates, with a type of moral authority which is also decidedly irrelevant. I note with interest that the defenders of the comic industry blame the whistle blowers for not definitively proving that comics have a detrimental effects on young minds, when intellectual honesty tells us that such a point can't be proven in a scientific sense anyway. What is required then instead, is common sense, which tells us that there is a limit to what we want our kids to be reading in comic books. This is one of main points I think, brought forth by Coates' predecessors, Dr. Fredric Wertham and Senator Estes Kefauver. As I said before, I don't approve of the government censoring comic books, but I also won't jump up and down either, insisting that children can't possibly be influenced by what they read. Personally, I wouldn't care if my (hypothetical) son was reading about zombies returned from the grave, but I would be very angry if he was reading about the "pleasures" of smoking crack. So I can see what Wertham was concerned about, given that he was dealing with comics which had stooped to a low not previously seen before (children murdering their parents)! Of course people will be concerned then, when standards seem to be plummeting. Any conscientious parent will draw a line somewhere, and the genius of Wertham's attacks, was that they woke parents up to what their children were reading, instigating changes in the comics industry without federal government mandates. The will of the people was done, censorship of comics through the Comics Code Authority. I don't agree with what was done, but it happened, and I won't pretend that I don't understand it at least a little bit.
Trombetta also suggests that a particular attack on the comics industry is an intentional distraction away from real life crimes, such as parents beating their children. Trombetta wrote..."(committee junior counsel Herbert) Beaser was there to kill the (comic book's) message (of real life child abuse). His intention was not to police abuse, but to police the representation of abuse." I'm not sure if Trombetta even believes his own words regarding that? Somehow I doubt that the government had a vested interest in protecting real world child abusers. Sure, kids back in those days were given corporal punishment beatings that seem cruel by today's standards, but that was a society norm eagerly enforced by adults everywhere, not just a supposedly corrupt government. I think it's more the truth that policing the comics industry was simply more realistically achievable, compared to imprisoning the entire adult population based on widespread child abuse. And there must have been legal limits to corporal punishment already anyway (killing your kids was not permitted, so far as I know).
Politics aside, "The Horror! The Horror!" is as fine a collection of gore and mayhem as can be found. Still a little tame by my standards, but I'm jaded as all get out. :)
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